Five strong leaders. Five good visions. One decision nobody had been asked to make.
One of the leading firms in its field had grown a $3M to $5M software business, with customers on three continents, on the back of its consulting. The talent was there. So was the demand. What the next stage needed was a decision the company had never had a reason to make.
5 → 1
Competing visions → one owner
8 to 10 → 2
Products in focus
15+
Diagnostic interviews
One of the leading firms in its field, sixty years old, privately owned, with a reputation it built one engagement at a time. The software came out of that expertise. First calculators and point solutions built to serve the consulting work, then two flagship products that grew into genuine SaaS offerings with customers on three continents. $3M to $5M a year in license fees and consulting pull-through is real traction, and they’d earned it almost on the side. So leadership wanted to know what it’d take to make it a business in its own right.
- Standing
- A leader in its field
- Industry
- Engineering consulting, oil & gas
- Revenue
- ~$100M · software $3M to $5M
- Age
- 60 years, privately owned
- Products
- 8 to 10, with a team sized for 2
“Digital should be moving faster than it is. Is that a talent question or a process question?”
“Neither. The talent and the process were sound. The company had never formally decided it was building a software business, so any leader could veto and nobody could greenlight.”
The team was capable and working hard, and leadership could see the output wasn’t keeping pace with the effort. So why not? Tech leads were coding, reviewing, deploying and mentoring all at once. Product owners doubled as salespeople and client-success managers. Division leaders were each running a one-person go-to-market operation. Everybody was carrying more roles than the structure had been built to hold, and that’s a massive load to put on any org chart.
- Fifteen-plus semi-structured interviews (executives, division leaders, product owners, tech leads, developers, QA, design), scored against a six-dimension SaaS maturity model calibrated for a consultancy making a software transition.
- Every dimension landed between 1.0 and 2.0 out of five, “ad hoc” to “emerging.” That’s normal for software grown inside a consultancy, and it says nothing about the people. What caught my eye was where the lowest scores sat: above the code, in strategic alignment and customer success.
- Five leaders held five different visions: platform consolidation, consulting enhancement, a $10M to $20M growth business. None of them were wrong. Nobody’d ever forced them to converge, so they never did.
- One designer had redesigned the same feature three times, because leaders who missed the meetings vetoed work that was already finished. Which is wild, and it’s exactly what you’d expect from a structure where anyone can veto and nobody can greenlight.
The deliverable was a diagnosis paired with a sequenced plan across six phases, built on one principle. Each phase frees the capacity the next one needs. Automate the deployment pipeline before anybody owns the software business and the work’s dead the first time two leaders disagree about it. So Phase 0 was the decision itself.
- 01
Phase 0: make the decision
Appoint one accountable owner of the software business. Stand up a two-tier technical leadership structure, an internal Head of Engineering for execution paired with a fractional CTO for direction. Create a formal incubator to hold the 6 to 8 non-core products, so the two flagships get the team’s full attention.
- 02
Phases 1 to 2: free the capacity
DevOps automation and product analytics, sequenced to when the team would actually have the bandwidth to sustain them.
- 03
Phases 3 to 5: build the discipline
A buy-vs-build framework, pricing discipline and a real software P&L, each one timed to the capacity the earlier phases released.
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accountability | Anyone can veto, no one can greenlight | One accountable owner | |
| Technical leadership | Tech leads wearing four hats | Head of Engineering + fractional CTO | |
| Hiring | Stalled | Phase 0 DevOps and CTO searches launched | |
| Product focus | 8 to 10 products, 2-product team | Cost-neutral plan rationalising to 2 flagships | |
| Strategy | 5 competing visions | 1 documented decision + sequenced roadmap |
Five competing visions became one documented decision and a roadmap the executive team can hold each other accountable to. There’s no magic in that. Somebody owns it now, and it’s written down.
“An organisation that had relitigated the same decisions for years now has one answer, one owner, and one sequence to follow.”
The metrics are deliberately absent, for now. This was a structural reset, and those take longer than a quarter to show up in the numbers. Test coverage, deployment frequency and renewal rate are worth revisiting once Phases 1 to 2 have run. Anonymised at the client’s request; a version with post-implementation numbers can follow when the results are in. I’d rather show you nothing than show you numbers that aren’t real yet.
Seven operational failures, fifteen interviews, a six-dimension maturity model. And the whole thing came down to one question, asked at the level of authority that could actually answer it. Why had nobody asked it before? Because for as long as the software was a side effect of the consulting, it didn’t need an owner, and a side effect that starts earning millions doesn’t announce the moment it stops being one. Strong companies grow into decisions they never had to make until they got good enough to need them. This was the one this business had been quietly working around.
What decision is your business quietly working around?
The Next Version finds where the money is actually stuck (starting with whether your numbers are even real) and names each move, what it’s worth, and who runs it. You keep the roadmap either way.